Intellicate – Duty Management Toolkit

DevTeam    Duty Management, Intellicate Solutions, News, Schedule24 Duty Management Toolkit     duty management, Duty Management Toolkit, GMP, Greater Manchester Police, Intellicate, law enforcement, local police, offiers, police, police commander, Port of Tilbury Police, SAP, schedules, South African Police, uk, workforce management system

When it comes to safeguarding public safety and security, the police is perhaps the most important service there is – and also most taken for granted. The police face a highly demanding working environment—in addition to arresting criminals and attending to crises, law enforcement officials spend much of their time working to lower everyday risk to people and property.

Coordinating the deployment of even a modest sized team of around 35 officers involves around  £2.8M of assets per year – not including equipment, training and support costs. Without a workforce management system to address complex scheduling factors, up to 65% of staffing costs can fall casualty to unplanned overtime, unexpected absences, and uncoordinated deployment.

Designed to work on standard office computers without the need of specialist IT support, what is stopping you proactively driving out costs in your operation.

Intellicate Duty Management customers:
Greater Manchester Police – Port of Tilbury Police – South African Police

Contact Intellicate today about a no obligation free evaluation.

Is there a difference between shift patterns and staff schedules?

Admin    General Discussion, News, Schedule24, Staff Scheduling     24 hour, 4 days on by 4 days off, automate, Intellicate, pattern, resources, schedule24, shift, shift patterns, staff, staff schedules, week, Working Hours

Yes there is…a big difference! and we have decided to consolidate all our staff scheduling resources into one Knowledgebase to get round what for many is a problem.

A shift pattern is simply a pattern of shifts. There are two basic types: a week based pattern and a sequence based pattern. The week based pattern is based on the 7 day week. A sequence based pattern is independent of the days of the week. For example 4 days on followed by 4 days off = 8 days; and the eight day week does not exist. The purpose of a shift pattern is to consistently define a sequence of shifts and days off in a specific order. The idea being to achieve balance and even distribution of working hours at different times of the day – or 24 hour period. Shift patterns are independent of calendar dates and staff.

A staff schedule on the other hand is dependent on calendar dates and staff, in fact its sole function is to align shifts with named staff to specific calendar dates. The purpose of a staff schedule is to inform staff when to turn up for work, nothing more nothing less. If you have a shift pattern, or a combination of shift patterns you can automate the production of your staff schedule. If you do not have a shift pattern then creating a staff schedule will be hard work, probably unfair and almost certainly expensive.

So you need both, and this is where to find them; and the tools to deliver unlimited combinations of both.

Intellicate are proud to be members of the The Cambridge Network

Admin    General Discussion, News     cambridge, Intellicate, network, software, Staff Scheduling Software, the cambridge network

Intellicate are proud to be a member of The Cambridge Network – The Cambridge Network aims to create and support a community of like-minded people from business and academia in the Cambridge region and link this community to the global high-tech network for the benefit of the Cambridge region.

The Cambridge Network was founded in 1998 by an influential group comprising the then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, now Lord Broers, with businessmen and entrepreneurs Hermann Hauser, David Cleevely, Nigel Brown, Fred Hallsworth, and Anthony Ross then head of 3i Cambridge.

Intellicate Product Name Changes: Schedule24 and Schedule24 Resource Manager

DevTeam    General Discussion, Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24, Schedule24 Resource Manager     Intellicate, professional, schedule24, Schedule24 Resource Manager, staff scheduling, team, workforce

Intellicate announces that the Schedule24 Standard Staff Scheduling application will now be called Schedule24 and Schedule24 Professional will now be called Schedule24 Resource Manager. This to better reflect the types of role each product has on the workforce and staff scheduling industry.

We hope you enjoy to continue using the Schedule24 staff scheduling product range.

The Schedule24 Team

Schedule24 Standard 4.6 Now Available

DevTeam    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24     Google Calendars, ICalendar, Intellicate, Outlook calendar, Schedule24 Standard 4.6 Now Available, Schedule24 Update, Yahoo calendar

Schedule24 Standard 4.6 has been released! We’ve finished updating Schedule24 Standard based on our customers feedback. The new version is now available to all licesned customers of 4.x via the update site. Not surprisingly, one of the most frequent requests from Schedule24 Standard customers is for breaks, and until now,  only available in the Professional edition — not any more! While working on the above, we thought it a good idea to also include and enhance some additional functionality, see below.  If you’re not yet a customer, there’s no better time to start a free trial of Schedule24 Standard, the #1 staff scheduling software for business teams.

If you’ve already got Schedule24 Standard, here is a quick guide to the new features:

• iCalendar enables shift times, assigments and vacation information within Schedule24 Standard to be sent via email to staff’s personal calendars, such as Google, Yahoo and Outlook.
• Scheduling breaks within shift times is now possible in Schedule24 Standard. Breaks can be included or excluded from hours and time calculations. Helping you see and track the ‘true’ cost.
• Advanced business reporting is now available in Schedule24 Standard choose from 15 new reports; time sheets, sickness, vacation, block schedules and many more.
• Import staff information into Schedule24 Standard from other applications  and sources. Support for Quickbooks, CSV and other formats.
• Flexible licensing only pay for what staff you schedule. Schedule24 Standard now supports as little as 25 staff per schedule and up to 400 staff per schedule. Remember, you can create and modify unlimited staff schedules within every version of Schedule24 Standard.

More information and a fully functional trial is available from the intellicate website.

We hope you enjoy using Schedule24 Standard 4.6, and look forward to hearing your feedback.

The Schedule24 Team

UK police overtime, causes, effects and cure.

Admin    Duty Management, General Discussion     Accenture, CCJS, Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, Chief Constable, City of London Police, government, Home Office, HR, Intellicate, Norfolk Police, Northamptonshire Police, Northumbria Police, officers, overtime, police, public sector, Theresa May, UK police overtime

The police are first in line for sweeping cuts, in particular with regard to spiralling overtime costs. Out trot the usual calls for review teams, working parties, regulation overhaul and a host of other non-person causal effects creating a system that has been described as madness.

Police overtime is no different to any other kind of overtime, but in the public sector it can develop an institutional shell that becomes very resilient to normal business-like intervention. The first danger is drawing attention to something when you have no intention of doing anything about it. For example a joint report by the Chief Constable and Treasurer of the Northumbria Police Authority in February 2003 set out the procedure to reduce the overtime bill in accordance with National Guidelines. A modest Police Negotiation Board (PNB) target of 15% reduction with the usual exemptions and exclusions followed. Four years later the Northumbria police overtime stood at a little over £23M, or put another way during a ten year period it had increased by 549% – the biggest increase of any UK police force.

On average police overtime nationally has increased by 100% to stand at over £440M. This is in addition to other invested costs which has grown police resources during the same period by between 12%-30% depending how you do the counting. The report by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (CCJS) makes some sense of the number crunching that goes on. It also highlights the disconnect between increasing resources by over half, while hiking overtime (a strategy when resources are insufficient) into the stratosphere.

So here we are again. Attention is focused on reducing the police overtime bill, the similar PNB 15% is being targeted as a respectable attempt to rein in costs, and as mentioned earlier a raft of factors (that have little or no impact on overtime anyway) need urgent review. So what will happen now? Given the police overtime is currently running at 48.3% we know it will total over £656M by 2016. If the same institutional shell of the past 10 years is allowed to harden further it will be much worse. Changing a few health and safety culture issues, notice periods on days-off changes and even shift patterns (an old favourite) will not dent this shell. We will see new forces enter the field as the operations frontline will extend all the way back to HR, perhaps even an e-HR, and beyond. Intelligence-led or otherwise all this will do is make police resources more reliant on process that only drive up costs.

Police overtime, like all overtime, is not a bad thing thing. It is bad when it spirals out of control; and happens when the scheduling horizon of staff resources is too short. I don’t mean 12 month rosters – that’s not planning that’s a pattern. Nothing more nothing less. When police deployment is being pushed around in spreadsheets – pencil behind the ear – in monthly chunks, or worse by a system no one understands, high staff costs are assured – and ripe for exploitation at any level.

Demand-led deployment? Already been done – Accenture and Home Office Circular 2002. Dedicated police resource managers – already recommended a decade ago. Variable shedule arrangements? already done to death but 12 hour shifts are popular. The latest initiative surrounding workforce modernization produced a useful 101 social science paper on research methods, and a web site shadow peppered with broken and outdated links from a time there may have been belief. In fact there is a rich seam of research that any “pan-handler” having the energy can sift through for any nugget of argument they want. Some are still talking about a 10 year plan – they don’t even have 10 months.

So what would be a sensible thing to do?. First a visit to the City of London Police, Norfolk and Northamptonshire Police and find out what they are doing. Three forces that not only kept overtime costs down to pre 10 year levels, but reduced them even lower. Second, when staff costs of a modest police unit of 35 sworn officers costs over £2M in assets a year, lets start treating this as a serious operations management skill not an admin function – and that does not preclude civilian staff delivering those skills. If you can scale the management skill so much the better. Finally extend the scheduling horizon at least 6 months ahead of the game, 9 months or longer even better – even fewer suprises! Coordination, communication and control delivered by those closest the problem I guarantee will transform the way you do business.

Alternatively we can all wait for a public debate about priorities and choices.

Efficiency and Effectiveness – What it is, and what it isn’t.

Richard Mills CEO    General Discussion     busniess, companies, efficiency, Employee Scheduling, Intellicate, job cuts, Schedule24 Workflow Management, scheduled work hours, shift, shift pattern, staff, work, workforce

A 2007 whitepaper about neglected management skills in the workplace, highlighted the lack of coordination, communication and control of staff in businesses operating extended or 24 hours working.  It was written at the height of “boom time” during which team leaders and line supervisors were unwittingly transformed from people to process managers, and management teams continued to pursue the fads and fashion surrounding talent management and 360-deg performance driven reward and retention programs.  However, basic workplace skills continued to be neglected. Three years on and things are somewhat different. The “piranha” is upon us and pundits are extolling “tough times” will be around for a long time to come.

Certainly most of us are aware expectations have been firmly pushed into the ”more demand for efficiencies in the workplace” debate. So what is efficiency? Well on its own nothing much. The ultimate state of efficiency is where no energy is expended. So closing everything down is about as efficient as it can get, but that doesn’t really help. We will however hear about efficiency ad nauseam and it will become synonymous with cost-cutting, which in turn will become welded to job cuts. For business to be both efficient and effective may well involve job cuts, but carrying out job cuts does not make a business efficient and effective. Often businesses continue just as inefficient and ineffective as before – just smaller.

Efficiency can only have meaning when associated with our effectiveness to achieve something – a business or management goal for example. It may be worth bearing in mind you can be effective yet inefficient, and efficient yet ineffective. Efficiency and effectiveness are siblings of reason. You need both.  A much over-used phrase of late is the statement ”We will do whatever it takes”.  A hallmark of someone who has bypassed the faculty of thought if ever there was one.

Efficiency measures the amount of time and cost required to achieve a goal; and effectiveness measures whether that goal has been reached. The best outcome is to achieve a given goal in less time and cost than by alternatives means. The hardest task for the drive for  more efficiency is not reducing cost, that is easy – anybody can do that. Defining goals  and recognizing at what point they have been reached is much harder.

Leaving aside whether goals are defined and agreement when they are reached, another  relationship exists that many will try to bend in the name of efficiency but only succeed to break . The cast-iron relationship forged  between staff-cost, staff-count, and staff-hours is complex and the consequences often underestimated. Without the means to manage all three contexts simultaneously few ever get it right.

Intellicate Announces New “Phased Return to Work” (PRtW) Service

Admin    General Discussion, Intellicate Solutions     benefit, businesses, employee, HR, Intellicate, phased, Phased Return to Work, phased return work, prtw, services, solutions, work, workforce

Acclaimed workforce solutions provider helps businesses and employees achieve a smooth transition after a period of absence.

As budget-conscious companies look for creative ways to reduce employee turnover, cut back on training costs, and boost team morale, phased return to work (PRtW) has become a quickly growing trend. Billed as a progressive workplace benefit, PRtW is designed to smooth the transition after an employee has been out of the office for an extended period of time due to illness or injury.
With PRtW, the employee resumes his or her work schedule in increments. With approval from a supervisor, HR department, and/or physician, work hours are gradually increased over a pre-defined time frame.

In March of 2010, Intellicate added a PRtW service to their repertoire of workplace management services. As a leading provider of top-notch workforce solutions, the London-based company specializes in effective schedule management. Their flagship product, Schedule24 Professional, helps employers achieve maximum efficiency in staff allocation and management. With PRtW, Intellicate expands their offerings to accommodate this new development in workforce optimization.

Benefits of PRtW
A growing number of organizations, HR professionals, and medical providers are recognizing the long list of benefits that can be achieved by PRtW. When an employee resumes his or her workload gradually, he or she is less likely to suffer a relapse or enter a state of “burnout”, resulting in enhanced efficiency and productivity.

In a time of heightened awareness of labor rights and a surge of lawsuits, implementing PRtW helps to reduce the frequency of litigious employees and workplace discrimination claims. Phased return to work also ensures a higher level of accountability and knowledge for all parties involved.

“HR chiefs believe the note will inevitably lead to disputes between employers and staff,” says Tim Mills COO of Intellicate “Our PRtW services at phasedreturntowork.com significantly reduce the probability of conflicts.”

How Intellicate Can Help
By adding PRtW services to their offerings, Intellicate has allocated the resources and expertise to help small and mid-sized businesses manage all aspects of the process:

• Customizing a flexible but clearly defined PRtW program for each company
• Counseling employers on how to offer PRtW without compromising their existing operational policies or goals
• Balancing employee capabilities with organizational needs to minimize risk
• Creating detailed written PRtW plans for re-entry after a period of sick leave

As proven leaders in workforce scheduling strategies, Intellicate works with companies to create effective phased schedules designed to benefit the interests of all parties. Their expert HR outsourcing team provides insights and guidance along the way. “Dame Carol Black, the health expert who advocated this revolutionary approach, warned the fit-note won’t work without more detail,” Mills notes. “We’re providing the employer and employee with the kind of detail they can action together in the workplace”.

About Intellicate
With partners in Australia and the United States, Intellicate provides software and services to clients around the world. Schedule24 Professional is a registered trademark of Intellicate. Learn more about their world-class workforce solutions at www.intellicate.com.

Payroll records for work hours is no protection

Richard Mills CEO    Intellicate Solutions, Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors     companies, EECWTD, Employee Scheduling, European Economic Community Working Time Directive, Intellicate, payroll records, scheduled work hours

A UK company was fined £54k (including £24k costs) for health and safety breaches which directly contributed to the death of an employee in a road traffic collision. Briefly the facts leading up to the fatal sequence of events included the driver working 11 days without a break, and three days before the accident had recorded 19 hours a day. Evidence was presented to show this was not an isolated incident and involved other employees.

Opting out of legislation e.g. European Economic Community Working Time Directive (EECWTD) does not mean you opt out of health and safety issues or duty to exercise care. This catches a lot of employers out. Recording working hours for payroll is a post event process for accounting. It has nothing to contribute toward exercising a duty of care. In short a company that wishes to discharge a duty of care has to demonstrate working hours are planned and scheduled not simply recorded. Scheduled work hours can be used for payroll, but not the other way round.

The irony is companies who say they use payroll records for working hours management when things go wrong probably don’t realise these records are the first port of call for the prosecutor not the defence.

Workforce schedule optimization is not compromization

Richard Mills CEO    Schedule24 Workflow Management, Shift Patterns, Workforce Factors    

One of the inputs we spend some time is demonstrating just how big a problem optimizing a workforce schedule is. In fact it is such a big problem and so expensive to achieve, examples are very hard to find – except for the most trivial scheduling problem. So why does everybody seem to offer this as a standard feature in workforce scheduling. Well in the main it is just a lazy use of marketing words. It sounds compelling, exciting and you know ‘you only get what you pay for’. That’s why you need very deep pockets, and a great deal of time on your hands to have a better than even chance to achieve that optimized workforce schedule.

An optimized schedule is the best possible solution available. First you need know all the factors that will define the pathways to be optimized to reach a defined goal. The more factors the bigger the problem to be solved. Even a handful of factors can generate a problem space that is measured in orders of magnitude. Put another way, defining the optimization model can be harder than doing the scheduling in the first place. Second, because there may be more than one solution you need to know all the solutions that are possible. These kinds of problem can take a very large computer a very long time to do this.

Another problem is we may decide what an optimum model is for staff headcounts and how they are distributed over a time range. Alternatively there may be a series of desirable goals for a staff day-on day-off working pattern. As more constraints are added the problem becomes easier to work out but the net result is what we considered optimum for one category is ruled out as new constraints for another category of information is added.

For example, the following goals ‘had to be’ achieved for a clients workforce deployment strategy. Not because they were desirable, but they had negotiated and signed off union contracts before realizing whether it was even possible:

• between 4 and 6 consecutive work days
• between2 and 3 consecutive rest days
• an exact number of days off in a pay period
• one weekend off and one weekend working in 4
• and at least one weekend day off in 3
• reduced staff at weekends

This occupied an HR team for a period a little over 7 months with no result. Using an intelligent agent designed to understand among other things the problem space of weeks in the context of week days and weekends completed the problem in 35 minutes. Out of a problem space of unknown size 4,712 candidates were identified as possible solutions. Only 13 of those solutions succeeded for further consideration.

Contraint scheduling can be contrasted with heuristic scheduling which promises to provide very good solutions most of the time. And a lot quicker and a lot more cheaply but that can be discussed another day.

Two things in conclusion.

• Don’t agree to something you don’t understand in the context of workforce schedules, you will invariably underestimate the problem; and
• When it comes optimization you probably are not getting what you pay for.

For more information about you staff deployment strategies contact Group Senior, Workforce Scheduding at Intellicate